The present invention relates to visual modeling of architectures or system designs, and, more specifically, to user customizable queries to populate model diagrams with elements of a model.
In model driven development (MDD), domain specialists, system architects and developers may communicate the architecture of a business or the design of a system, which may include software programs, through visual models. Different types of elements may be used in the model to represent the domain concepts, relationships and processes. To enable others to understand these various concepts and their relationships, model designers may use various reporting techniques, including specialized diagrams. Each diagram may typically show one or more types of elements and the relationships between those elements. With large models, it may be difficult for users to search such a model to find the desired types of elements within the model. The elements may be needed to populate the specialized diagrams.
Various modeling products may contain element types and may provide several components with public application programming interfaces (API) that may allows programmers to write code that can query a model for desired elements to populate a diagram with the results. However, most users of these products may not have the time and/or the skills necessary to write the required code to implement such a query mechanism. Although users may use existing product features to populate the diagrams manually, such a task may be time consuming and with large models there may be a risk of missing elements needed to populate the diagrams.